A Statistical Analysis of Defects in Debian and Strategies for Improving Quality in Free Software Projects

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses several statistical analyses of over 7,000 defect reports submitted on 77 core packages in the Debian system. The findings are of substantial value since they clearly show changes over time and allow the development of effective strategies for defect removal. It has been argued that free software and open source projects benefit from a high level of user involvement. Users influence the direction of a project through feature requests, and their identification of bugs and defects in the software contributes to high levels of quality. These analyses are used to make observations on the efficiency of the open source development process used by projects such as Debian and leads to recommendations on how to improve this process. Finally, this study shows that many important insights can be gained through the analysis of defect data that has been recorded over time, possibly for years. The tool written for this study can be used to investigate roughly 300,000 defect reports stored in Debian's bug tracking system.